“And we could set our welcome for them along them few paths. I think we could make it work, Rampart Fire.”
She give me a look that I see in my mind’s eye right now. She saw where I was going and met me coming back. The two of us, thinking how to turn a forest floor into a piece of the dead god’s Hell and catch our enemies in the middle of it.
“Yes,” was all she said. “We should do that.”
29
It was June when Vallen came.
I was in the deep woods on a day that threatened thunder. The sky was as dark as the inside of a sack, which meant more dust was coming, but until the storm hit we could move abroad without any fear of the trees moving against us. We were digging ditches beside the path we called the southern sag. I was showing my crew of four diggers how to line the ditch with waxed hides and use drizzled wax to seal the edges – a trick I learned from dyeing that lent itself well to what we purposed.
It had been a long day, and a testing one. We had ten fighters with spears to watch over us as we worked, not to mention Jarter with the scatter-gun and Jon with the rifle (it should have been Morrez who took the rifle, since his eye was keenest, but Fer wouldn’t hear of letting him out of gates with a weapon in his hands). But even though we came in so much strength, we were harried and halted ever and again. First we disturbed a tree-cat queen that had just littered, and she almost had Jarter’s arm off before Jon got her in the rifle’s sights and took her clean. After that, we had to kill the litter too, and the smell of blood brought needles swarming on us. Then, in the middle of the afternoon, the cloud cover that had been so thick and full got patchy, and before we could gather up our kit and move we had triptails waking all round us. It would have gone hard for us without the scatter-gun. Jarter turned in a circle, firing as quick as she could bring shells into the gun’s breach, ripping the triptails into shreds.
By the time the light began to fail us, we were all of us exhausted. “We should finish there,” Jon said, “and take up again tomorrow.”
“We can finish tonight,” I said. “Another hour sees it done.”
But just then I felt my gut heave and my legs almost give way.
Jon was at my side at once, and caught me before I fell. “What is it, Spin?” he said. “Are you sick?”
“I’m well enough, Jon,” I gasped. “But our baby’s coming and I don’t think there’s any stopping her.” My waters broke right then, as if my whole body was agreeing with what my mouth just said.
Jon and Jarter put me on a travois that had carried the jugs of yellow oil we brought to fill the ditch. The tally all took turns to carry me at a dead run through Calder’s hills and Calder’s glades. I say they took turns, but Jon held on all the way, taking the place closest to my head and using some of his store of breath to whisper ever and again that it was all right, it was fine, it would go well. If any dared to slow down, Jarter cursed them on again with fucks and cunts and blind-yous, until finally they staggered through the gates half-dead and Mull Woodsmith rang the tocsin bell to tell the village we was come.
Vallen was come. My baby girl.
I gave birth in Rampart Hold, because that was where they brought me. If the choice had gone to me, I would have asked for the tannery, but it went to Jon and even now he still thought of the Hold as his home. Jarter stayed with me while he ran to fetch Shirew Makewell, but Vallen was in too much of a hurry to be born. Jarter and Ban Fisher delivered me, and Jon ran into the room just in time to see her head as she forced her way into the world, crying before she was even out of me.
This is me! that cry said. What have you got for me, now I’ve come all this way?
We’re still making it, the world answered. Child of Mythen Rood, we’re still only halfway there.
30
Women will say your first child changes you, and I will not say any different. Vallen when she was in my belly was already with me and precious to me. Vallen after she was come into the world filled my sight from horizon to horizon. I wanted nothing more than to be with her and learn who she was.
Jon was the same, or else he was worse. This little squawling thing that was as raw and red as a pashberry in Abril had the two of us cooing and babbling nonsense at her as if she was the dead god’s mother. We stayed in the Hold and Ban looked after us, coming in between us and the business of the village so we could enjoy those first few days as if nothing else was real but the three of us and our joy.
But the first days stretched out into a week, and the week was like to turn into a fortnight. I realised this wouldn’t do Jon was working with Kay Hammer on the new knives and I was wanted in the Count and Seal. For the two of us to be shut away at the same time was disaster. “We got to go turn and about, is what,” I said. “With one of us working and the other indoors tending this monster. Otherwise we’ll take root here and never step out again.”
“That’s fair enough,” Jon said. “My turns is going to have to be short though. You got the one thing Val insists on right now, which is titties. All I can do when she cries is make faces at her.”
The titties were a sore point, as they say. Vallen was a bad feeder. The first time I put her to the breast, she didn’t even seem to know what a nipple was, let alone what it was for. She sucked fretfully and lost interest quickly, long before she was full. Being hungry, she woke oftentimes in the night. Her full-throated cry would drag me out of my bed ever and again to stagger across the room to her crib and try in vain to make her take what she wanted and needed most in the world. So when Jon said these words to me I was slumped in the window seat with Vallen in my arms, my wake so close to sleep I was dreaming with my eyes open, and the front of my shirt was soaked with milk that didn’t have anywhere else to go. I looked like a wight that had been buried and dug up again.
“But I got to go to the Count and Seal,” I said. “I got to see what’s been done bad, with me away, or not done at all. Last I heard, we was at war with Half-Ax.”
“But my mother’s Rampart Fire again, Spin. And we got a baby.”
“I noticed the baby, Jon. And now she’s come, I got that much more to fight for.”
Jon come and sit with us, and put his arms around us both. “I thought you might want to leave the fighting to others now,” he said gently. “For a while, at least.”
“Did you then?”
“Val needs you. And you need rest.”
“We got a plan though, for when Half-Ax comes. And I’m in the plan because Challenger is in the plan. He won’t answer to nobody but me. So don’t throw our baby in my face like she’s the last king in the stone-game and you just beat the table.”
Jon could never hide it when he was hurt – especially if it was someone he loved that was doing the hurting, like me or his mother or (a long time ago) Koli Woodsmith. He didn’t let go his hold on me, but some of that gentleness went out of his face. “I wasn’t throwing nothing. But the world don’t stop spinning when you close your eyes, Spin. Nor the Count and Seal don’t go to sleep when you’re not in the chamber. This don’t all hang on you.”
I put my hand on his cheek, sorry that I had spoken so harsh – but wanting still to make him understand. “It don’t all hang on me, Jon. But some of it does. I’m no less when it comes to loving Val than you are, and I think you know that, for it’s not often our hearts sing out of tune with each other. But I can’t step back from this trouble any more than you can. We got to give what’s in us to give.”